DollsRalphie is a traveling businessman who is also a big kid at heart.  While traveling one dark and stormy night, he happens upon two punk rock girls hitchhiking.  He picks them up and they find themselves seeking refuge in an old mansion, after the car is stuck in mud, owned by elderly couple who make dolls.

Ralphie and the girls aren’t the only wanderers who find themselves at the old house in the middle of the night.  Little Judy is there, also, with her abusive father and wicked stepmother; that’s right, there car is stuck also (funny how these things happen).  How wicked is her stepmother?  She throws Judy’s teddy bear away.  That’s just down right mean.

Luckily, at the old couple’s house, they have plenty of dolls.  These dolls, however, aren’t the average, everyday, Chatty Kathy’s and Barbies.  These dolls come to life and kill.  More to the point, they punish.  But they don’t punish the innocent, only the bad.  Like a certain bad dad and mean stepmom.

You may sit down to watch Dolls expecting something other than what you get.  I thought I was going to see a slash’em up, especially since the cover showed a doll taking its own eyeballs from its head.  What you actually get with Dolls is a fairy tale, but with a sinister twist.  There is actually a gentle heart beating just under the scares with some needed advice about losing our childlike whimsy.  It’s really about the young at heart and the kid in all of us.


This is an early Stuart Gordon film, made after Re-Animator and From Beyond.  After Dolls he kind of hit the skids until surfacing on Masters of Horror with “Dreams In the Witch-House”.  Of the Gordon films I’ve seen, this is the most interesting. The killer dolls in Dolls look pretty darn good, too.  This was well before CGI ruled the world, and I think CGI would have ruined the effect this movie has completely.  Believe it or not, Dolls has an innocence that is hard to find in horror.  Or movies in general.

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